Stephen Campbell: Mantegna circa 1460: the Gaze of St. Zeno

Stephen J. Campbell, Professor and Chair for History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, is a specialist in Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His work has particularly focused on the artistic culture of North Italian court centers, on the Ferrarese painter Cosmè Tura and the Paduan Andrea Mantegna; other projects have resulted in studies of Giorgione, the Carracci, Agnolo Bronzino, Michelangelo and Rosso Fiorentino. This work explores the relation between artistic theory and practice and literary models of imitation and interpretation, along with the consequences of this encounter for the reception of the work of art in broader social and religious spheres. He has published several books, most recently 'The Cabinet of Eros' (2006) on the rise of mythological painting in Italy. Currently he is working on a studies of the fifteenth century painter Mantegna, and one on the reception of Venetian art in its territorial periphery in the 1500s. He recently completed 'Art in Italy 1400-1600', co-authored with Michael Cole, to be published by Thames and Hudson, London, in early 2011.

Stephen Campbell was educated at Trinity College, Dublin (BA 1985), the University of North Carolina (MA 1987) and Johns Hopkins University (1993). Before joining the faculty of Johns Hopkins in 2002 he taught at Case Western Reserve University (1993-94), the University of Michigan (1995-1999), and the University of Pennsylvania (1999-2002). In 1993 he published a book for a general audience on the Great Irish Famine of 1847-1851, with a preface by President of Ireland Mary Robinson. In 2002 he was guest curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, for the exhibition Cosmè Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara. More recently, he was a consultant for and participant in the PBS television series Art through Time: A Global View to be broadcast in Autumn of 2010.